Awesome
Hacker News Realified
HN Realified is a basic Chrome (others soon?) extension that auto-updates select Hacker News pages. The code makes use of HN's Firebase-based API.
<div align="center"> <a href="https://gfycat.com/TanWetGoosefish"> <img src="https://fat.gfycat.com/OrderlyOffbeatChuckwalla.gif"> </a> </div>Installation
Google Web Store:
[] (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/egimmhannkdglaafhglalfpfddkfhffk)
Known Caveats
HN servers and Firebase snapshots are not always synchronized in real-time. This goes both ways: (1) HN servers return stale content when Firebase already detected updates in the data, and (2) Firebase update broadcasts are delayed when HN servers are returning fresh data.
Since this extension uses Firebase to subscribe for updates only and fetch HN servers for the new HTML content, the page is not always updated in real-time because of the two issues above.
Development
# Clone the project and cd into it.
$ npm install
$ npm run build:chrome
Contributing
If the project gains enough traction, below are some nice to have features I have in mind. Feel free to implement any and submit a PR.
- Firefox, Opera extensions
- Smarter page updates
- Currently stories are blatantly replaced via
innerHTML
with new HTML content (fetched via an AJAX request). It would be nice to replace only changed items. This will help with visual indicator.
- Currently stories are blatantly replaced via
- Visual indicators
- It would be nice to visually indicate when items are added/removed/moved.
- Auto-update point and comment counts
- Auto-update comments page